Friday, 28 April 2017

Trump supporters take a selfie with white nationalist leader Nathan Damigo, who punched a woman at the last Berkeley rally.: image via Shane Bauer @shane_bauer, 27 April 2017

A white nationalist punches her in the face. Then they come after her
and her family. Still no charges from police.: image via Shane Bauer
@shane_bauer, 27 April 2017

This guy with the American flag attached to a bat insisted that if I quote him, I refer to him as "the giant.": image via Shane Bauer @shane_bauer, 27 April 2017

Approaching the 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement

Platz Uritzki, Saint Petersburg: Natan Altman, October 1918: a temporary work of post-Cubist architectural sculpture erected to publicly commemorate the first anniversary of the October Revolution; by the following anniversary, Altman's canvasses "had already been cut up and used for soldiers' foot bindings" -- Susan M. Cerbesero: The Anniversaries of the October Revolution, 1918-1927 (2005): photographer unknown, from G: Journal for Elemental Form Creation 3, 1924 (Estate of Natan Altman/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York)

It lasted one moment, like the full blown lustreof a peach or a rose, the next momentthat airy dream was over, now remain the unlit businessblocks, rats scurrying from trash bin to glassed-in bank
arcade, pavement carpeted with wet leaves, bodies sheltering in the light rain dripping from the building overhang, the bones, the blowsthat fall from all directions, from unlikely sources,the scanning search beam of the police cruiser
cutting through the red mist, the quiet click of the picture of no onebeing taken by an autoprogrammed camera somewherebeneath the big clock on the bankoutside the BART station, the brokenclock that's never been correct, just as
the O/C guy who weirdly resembles Allen Ginsbergconfides in haste-elided rapidfire aside I'maJewGeminiJustLikeBobbyDylanas he rushes past on his nightly rounds, quick-pace
orchestra conductor of a speeded-up cartoon ghost symphonywaving his broken-off-wooden-chair-rung baton, furiouslybanging on every newspaper boxin repetitive percussive impatient urgent enquiry
to see if the lost magic of revolutionmight still be lingering in a broken coin slot

TC: Approaching the 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, November 2012, from Truth Game, 2013

Crowd
in front of Sproul Hall in rain during Free Speech Movement rally:
photo by Ron Hecker, December 1964 (UC Berkeley, University Archives)

Crowd
in front of Sproul Hall in rain during Free Speech Movement rally:
photo by Ron Hecker, December 1964 (UC Berkeley, University Archives)

Surrounding a University police
car in Sproul Hall Plaza on 1 October, demonstrators listen to Mario
Savio (standing on car
roof) protest arrest of Jack Weinberg. Weinberg
remained in the stranded car for 32 hours, until an agreement between
President
Kerr and protest leaders ended demonstration:
photo by Don Kechely, 1 October 1964 (UC Berkeley, University Archives)

Surrounding a University police
car in Sproul Hall Plaza on 1 October, demonstrators listen to Mario
Savio (standing on car
roof) protest arrest of Jack Weinberg. Weinberg
remained in the stranded car for 32 hours, until an agreement between
President
Kerr and protest leaders ended demonstration:
photo by Don Kechely, 1 October 1964 (UC Berkeley, University Archives)

Memorial to the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley: image by Coro, 13 January 2009

Screaming Me-Me's

A video of Nathan Damigo (top) and Emily Rose Marshall (below) during the street fighting in Berkeley on April 15 went viral: photo by Stephen Lam/Reuters via ZUMA Press 15 April 2017

A Punch in the Face Was Just the Start of the Alt-Right's Attack on a Berkely protester: Then came the threats, doxing, and meme warfare: Shane Bauer, Mother Jones, 27 April 2017

On
Saturday, April 15, Emily Rose Marshall drove up to Berkeley,
California, from Los Angeles with a group of friends who were part of
the anarchist Oak Roots Collective. They had heard about the "free
speech" rally being held in Berkeley by an array of Donald Trump
supporters,
militiamen, and white supremacists. "We saw this was a rally meant to
uplift neo-Nazis and the alt-right," Marshall says. "We wanted to be
bodies yelling and screaming in the street, adding to the number of
people letting neo-Nazis know they couldn't just show up for racism."

By the time Marshall and her friends arrived in downtown Berkeley,
the scene had devolved into street skirmishes between the right-wing
side and "antifascist" counterprotesters. She and her friends were
dressed in black like their "antifa" comrades,
masking their faces to protect their identities. They went near the
front line where people were facing off. An antifa activist lobbed a
tear gas canister, but the wind blew the cloud back and right wingers
rushed the antifa side, swinging.

When the short melee was over, Marshall wasn't entirely sure what had
just happened. Marshall, a 95-pound, 20-year-old white woman with
dreadlocks who also goes by the alias Louise Rosealma, had been punched
at least twice. The crew of right wingers who Marshall, her boyfriend,
and others had tussled with for a minute ran up the street in pursuit of
other antifa. She didn't know it yet, but the man who had hit her was
Nathan Damigo, a 30-year-old ex-Marine and head of the white nationalist
group Identity Evropa. Within minutes, a video of her getting punched was on its way to going viral.

Blood was streaming from Marshall's boyfriend's nose, which looked
like it might be broken. They left the rally and went to a hospital.
After she got in the car, she checked her phone. Hate emails started
streaming in. "Would you be interested in doing a role play photoshoot,"
read one she later forwarded to me, "where you are being beaten and
raped (simulated), by a group of white nationalists?" "I absolutely love
watching you get punched in your ugly ass face on YouTube. I can watch
it over and over," another read. "Might I suggest leaping your ugly,
hairy ass from a tall building? Or, perhaps, swallow a bottle of
sleeping pills? How's it feel to finally be treated like a man? Haha."
Since then, she says she's received more than 1,500 harassing or
threatening messages via email, Facebook, and Instagram.

How did they know who Marshall was, and so quickly? One emailer
signed off, "Praise Kek and Hail Victory," hinting at the source of the
storm. "Kek" is the god of a satirical religion that originated in the meme-driven
world of 4chan, the online message board popular among the so-called
alt-right.

Archived 4chan threads provide a glimpse into workings of the
alt-right hive mind on the day of the Berkeley showdown. "Looks like a
rat faced kike," one commenter wrote shortly after the punching video
was posted. Threads discussing the video became interspersed with memes
of cartoon Jews with oversized noses. "That Jew whore thought she was
the Jew bear," one poster wrote. (Marshall is not Jewish.) Within hours
of her getting punched, people on 4chan and other message boards
publicized Marshall's home address and contact information for her
parents, grandmother, and 15-year-old brother. They discovered that
she'd appeared in pornography. They turned explicit images of her into
memes and posted links to her sex videos on her grandmother's Facebook
page. Before Marshall got back to Los Angeles that Saturday night, her
mom had received so many calls that she'd unplugged the phone.

Meme of Damigo punching Marshall spread on 4chan: image via 4chan

Meme of Damigo punching Marshall spread on 4chan: image via 4chan

Some on 4chan went to work building a case justifying Damigo's
decision to punch Marshall. Before arriving at the rally, she'd posted
on Facebook that she was "determined to bring back 100 nazi [sic] scalps," a reference to the Quentin Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds.
This was presented as evidence that she'd come to fight and was
therefore a fair target. Posters also found a Reuters photo and a video
showing Marshall holding a glass bottle as Damigo rushed toward her.
Some online posters claimed she had been throwing bottles at them. A
military gear site called Tactical Shit claimed Marshall was putting
powerful M80 firecrackers inside bottles and throwing them at rally
attendees:

"She was literally making IEDs. This makes her no better than
the Boston Marathon bomber." Damigo, the site claimed, was eliminating a
bomb threat.

Marshall insists none of this is true. She says she picked the bottle
off the ground to stave off attackers when the fight began. There is no
evidence to corroborate her account or the alt-right's. All that is
clear based on video of the incident is that Marshall was holding a
bottle as Damigo rushed in and hit her. She fell to the ground, dropped
the bottle, got up, and stumbled away. A moment later, Damigo found her
again and punched her in the face. (Asked for a comment from Damigo,
Identity Evropa responded, "The video footage and photographs of the
event as well as Miss Rosealma's social media speak for themselves.
Other than that we have no further comment.")

The alt-right is aware that the new fight with its anti-fascist
opponents is as much a clash of brawn on the streets as a culture war
online. During the lead up to the April 15 rally, one 4chan commenter
described it as "a battle on the front lines and the lefties help us
make fun memes for the ages." At the rally, some right-wing attendees
carried signs referencing obscure 4chan memes. Even as people were
fighting in the streets, the 4chan meme factory was already churning out
content.

Meme warfare is uniquely suited to the far right. Unlike the antifa's
culture of anonymity, the far-right rallies around visible strongmen.
Outlandish costumes like Spartan helmets and outrageous acts like
Damigo's "Falcon Punch" create excellent hero memes, which galvanize supporters and refute
critics. Where a man punching a woman in the face would have previously
been seen as an act of cowardice, it is now quickly recast as an act of
heroism against terrorism, of moralism over hedonism, or of the master
race against Jewish globalists.

The alt-right tried to identify others at the Berkeley rally as well.
Message boards posted pictures and purported names of various antifa
activists who'd shown up in Berkeley. One antifa man who hit someone in
the head with a bike lock was allegedly identified through a meticulous effort of combing through images of the rally and
matching the sunglasses and facial hair of an unmasked man with the
masked bike lock wielder's.

Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Sergeant Andrew Frankel says
the BPD is aware of the video, but he declined to state whether it is
pursuing charges against Damigo. Marshall says she has avoided pressing
assault charges against Damigo because she is afraid that if "they take
action against him, I'll have actual Nazis at my door instead of the
trolls."

Remember this is a day to celebrate free speech. Defend yourself against
violent protestors, but follow Police orders. #BlueLivesMatter: image via The Proud Boys @ProudBoysUSA, 27 April 2017

This guy with the American flag attached to a bat insisted that if I quote him, I refer to him as "the giant.": image via Shane Bauer @shane_bauer, 27 April 2017

In those stories the hero
is beyond himself into the next
thing, be it those labors
of Hercules, or Aeneas going into death.
I thought the instant of the one humanness
in Virgil's plan of it
was that it was of course human enough to die,
yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est.
That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking.
This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil
is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules
and the Aeneid, yet all that industrious wis-
dom lives in the way the mountains
and the desert are waiting
for the heroes, and death also
can still propose the old labors.

Santa Fe, New Mexico: photo by Jorge Guadalupe Lizárraga, April 2017

Santa Fe, New Mexico: photo by Jorge Guadalupe Lizárraga, April 2017

Santa Fe, New Mexico: photo by Jorge Guadalupe Lizárraga, April 2017

Robert Creeley (1926-2005): Heroes, from For Love, 1960

Robert Creeley: Window

Starlings perform a murmuration at sunset near Gretna Green, in the south of Scotland: photo by Owen Humphreys/PA Wire, 29 November 2016

.

Starlings perform a murmuration at sunset near Gretna Green, in the south of Scotland: photo by Owen Humphreys/PA Wire, 29 November 2016Multitudes of Starlings appear at Newton, and run feeding
about in the grass-fields. No number is known to breed in these parts.
This is therefore an emigration from some other district.Entry for 23 November 1780, in The Journals of Gilbert White

Sometimes it seems just

a push would get you over

the rooftops and out into air

it feels has nothing but

space to give you. This

riding high was made for serious

people who want to live but

can't. Just a push and you'reout, and free as the birds.

Out the window of the Eismeer station of the Jungfraubahn, Switzerland: photo by Stan Shebs, 1996

My
mother's people were all Maine people, they had specific ways of saying
things, they spoke with a particular humor. It was a way of speaking
that I learned as a child from my increasingly single parent... The ways
I placed the world were thus given a form in language from early on.
And in emotional moments I now find I increasingly return to that
language that's particularly local to my childhood and to the place
where I was brought up. Robert Creeley, in Tom Clark: Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place, 1993

The galloping collection of boards are the house which I afforded
one evening to walk into just as the night came down.

Dark inside, the candle lit of its own free will, the attic
groaned then, the stairs
led me up into the air.

From outside, it must have seemed a wonder that it was the inside he as me saw in the dark there.

Aftermath of an auto accident on Storrow Drive, Boston, nine o'clock in the morning: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, February 1973

When
two, seated on the lap of a nurse on the on the front seat of a car
beside my father as he drove through the city of Boston on some errand
or other, I was showered with broken glass full in the face
when a stray lump of coal shattered the side window. Again I recall
nothing of it, and perversely the year that followed must have been a
very happy one because I was not allowed to cry for fear of causing the
affected eye further damage. For some time, then, the eye was left in
place although it seems to have had little function. It began to grow
larger, however, and so, when I was five, just a year after my father's
death, the eye was taken out. That I do remember because my mother told
me we were to go to the hospital on some routine business of her own,
and once there, she suggested I wait inside, which was common enough.
But from there I was taken to the doctor, and so on and so forth, till I
came to with a great bandage covering my head, and the eye gone. So I
wish she had told me, although I rationally understood why she did not,
and why she also had not made clear to me our father wasn't coming back
after we saw him taken away in the ambulance across our front yard in
the snow. We knew nothing of the funeral, or let me speak for myself.
Those tracks fading in the spring thaws mark for me the end of that
previous time entirely.

But it is luck, which was the point, and the paradoxical fact that
that his death and my injury had a curious consequence. The company
employing the person responsible for the careful shovelful of coal paid
damages of some nine thousand dollars, enough to see me through college,
toward which I'd been determinedly propelled by my mother's sense of
duty to my father.Robert Creeley: from Autobiography, 1989, in Tom Clark: Robert Creeley and the American Common Place, 1993
Creeley
was like the loyal philosopher brother one dreams of having. Creeley
spoke almost dreamlike about loss. I truly believe he would have been
the only one to help me see clearly. After all, he had suffered real
loss himself, and his sense of psychic loss clung to him like a halo.

Jim Dine: from I Know About Creeley, 2012)

Switch House at the Taunton railroad crossing: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, April 1973

Switch House and Taunton railroad crossing: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, April 1973

Elevated
railroad structure and blighted area below Washington Street, looking
south from the corner of Bartlett, Boston, Massachusetts:
photo by Ernst Halberstadt (1910-1987) for U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, February 1973 (National Archives and Records
Administration)

House on fire at Independence Point on Buzzard Bay at Onset: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, May 1973

Robert Creeley (1926-2005): Somewhere, from For Love, 1962Photos by Ernst Halberstadt, 1973, for the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica Project (U.S. National Archives)

Robert Creeley: For Debora

An ethnic Rohingya Muslim woman looking back as she rides a tuk tuk
near a camp set up outside the city of Sittwe in Myanmar’s Rakhine
state. Malaysia ordered search and rescue missions Friday for thousands
of boatpeople stranded at sea, as Myanmar hosted talks with US and
Southeast Asian envoys on the migrant exodus from its shores: photo by Ye Aung Thu/AFP, 22 May 2015

An ethnic Rohingya Muslim woman looking back as she rides a tuk tuk
near a camp set up outside the city of Sittwe in Myanmar’s Rakhine
state. Malaysia ordered search and rescue missions Friday for thousands
of boatpeople stranded at sea, as Myanmar hosted talks with US and
Southeast Asian envoys on the migrant exodus from its shores: photo by Ye Aung Thu/AFP, 22 May 2015

"I have forgotten allhuman relations, but notpoetry." I have for-gotten all that seemedsignificant but notthe consequence. I have never seen this beforethis I have wanted tomake this trip manytimes but got lost gettingthere I have had manysorrows in my literallife but much happiness also I have forgottenwhat it was they thoughtto remember. I have forgotten.

A Palestinian boy rests on an old armchair in front of a dilapidated house on Friday in Gaza City: photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP, 22 May 2015

A Palestinian boy rests on an old armchair in front of a dilapidated house on Friday in Gaza City: photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP, 22 May 2015

...for Penelope HightonDa. Da. Da da.
Where is the song.
What’s wrong
with lifeever. More?
Or less --
days, nights,
thesedays. What's gone
is gone forever
every time, old friend's
voice here. I wantto stay, somehow,
if I could --
if I would? Where else
to go.The sea here's out
the window, old
switcher's house, vertical,
railroad blues, lonesome

whistle,
etc. Can you
think of Yee's Cafe
in Needles, California
opposite the trainstation -- can you keep
it ever
together, old buddy, talking
to yourself again?Meantime some yuk in Hamilton has blown
the whistle on a charming
evening I wantedto remember otherwise --
the river there, that
afternoon, sitting,
friends, wine & chicken,watching the world go by.
Happiness, happiness --
so simple. What's
that anger is thatcompetition -- sad! --
when this at least
is free,
to put it mildly.My aunt Bernice
in Nokomis,
Florida's last act,
a poem for Geo. Washington'sbirthday. Do you want
to say ‘It's bad’?
In America, old sport,
we shoot first, talk later,or just take you out to dinner.
No worries, or not
at the moment,
sitting here eating bread,cheese, butter, white wine --
like Bolinas, ‘Whale Town,’
my home, like they say,
in America. It's one worldit can't be another.
So the beauty,
beside me, rises,
looks now out window --and breath keeps on breathing,
heart's pulled in
a sudden, deep, sad
longing, to wantto stay -- be another
person some day,
when I grow up.
The world's somehowforever that way
and its lovely, roily,
shifting shores, sounding now,
in my ears. My ears?Well, what's on my head
as two skin appendages,
comes with the package,
I don't want toargue the point.
Tomorrow
it changes, gone,
abstract, new places --moving on. Is this
some old time weird
Odysseus trip
sans paddle -- upthe endless creek?
Thinking of you,
baby, thinking
of all the thingsI'd like to say and do.
Old fashioned time
it takes to be
anywhere, at all.Moving on. Mr. Ocean,
Mr. Sky's
got the biggest blue eyes
in creation --

here comes the sun!
While we can,
let's do it, let's
have fun.
Robert Creeley: So There, from Hello (Hawk Press, Taylors Mistake, Christchurch, New Zealand), 1976

The Fun of the Fair: poster for New Zealand Centennial Exhibition of 1939-40, offset lithograph by Charles Haines Advertising Agency Ltd, N.Z., November 1939 (Printed Ephemera
Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand)

New Zealand Line. R.M.S. Rangitata
in Gaillard Cut:poster for New Zealand Shipping Company Ltd, screenprint, early 1930s (Printed Ephemera
Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand)

Thank you, Jasper. I expect you will be able to fathom some sense of the scale of the job. Exhausting, but once begun with something, if the something is of value, there can be no turning back, as I'm sure you also understand. It may be hard to hold in the mind at any single moment all the things that seem to be converging upon the instant meaning of the present. These latter years moreover it has seemed more difficult than ever to sort those things, as we flail and flounder along in the accumulating dark. For me RC's work has remained a beacon, through all this. The memorial function of poetry, to keep the memory green, is also, to my mind, very close to the principal duty of the living now, if anything of value is to remain.

Through much of the labour here, by the way, the sky overhead was abuzz with circulating police helicopters, monitoring the latest proto fascist invasion of our entirely undeserving little town. We are now unwilling host to ambitious grifter thugs from all over, like the charming young fellow seen at the top of his post, who has become, unbelievably as one might have thought, a hero to those for whom hate is value. Nowhere to hide... and America, we have nowhere but you to be.

Having lived with these words throughout my adult life, no surprise the ones that jumped out, "this is Robert Creeley speaking." On the occasion of our 44th anniversary in the Woodman household, we thank you Tom Clark for this gift.